The Reuter's Article is HERE. It was posted on Sept. 25th, and already has over 550 comments posted.
It seems that a get out the Vote project run by a member of a local chapter of the Houston SEIU union (similar to Acorn programs) resulted in huge numbers of fake voters who voted during the Obama elections in Harris County, TX. Harris County has 1.9-million voters and is the second largest county in the country with almost 900 voting precincts.
Read the article to know more. It seems a local activist got 50 friends to monitor voting operations and witnessed much fraud., such as id's not being checked for each voter. They then expanded the search and researched precints where houses listed more than six voters. The average precinct had 1800 - 2400 voters, but they found one precinct with 24,000 voters, and then researched why.
Quotes from the article:
"But we came across one (precinct) with 24,000, and that was where we started looking."
It was Houston's poorest and predominantly black district, which has led some to accuse the group of targeting poor black areas. But Engelbrecht rejects that, saying, "It had nothing to do with politics. It was just the numbers.”
“Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address,” Engelbrecht said. “We then decided to look at who was registering the voters."
Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Steve Caddle, who also works for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.
Finally, when the voting fraud was disclosed by officials after their own investigation, a fire conveniently destroyed $40-million of voting machines the day after the disclosure. That will leave the elections department only six weeks to devise a replacement voting system.
I am going to use this article to do some research about whether similar fraud has occured in Lake County.
When I worked as a consultant in Iraq, one method they used to prevent voter fraud was to require each voter to dip their thumb in black ink that could not be removed for several days. That prevented the same person from voting more than once. However, that did not prevent ballot box stuffing, etc.
This also indicates why it is important to volunteer to monitor polling places. Each political party has a program to assign volunteer monitors at each voting precinct location to ensure voters follow the rules. If you have not done this before, consider asking your political party about volunteering to monitor a voting location. I did that in the last election, but I has in a retirement community where they were very well run and hardly any problems occurred. As this article describes, the problems are in low income communities, not the wealthy areas.
VJ
